Klondike: The Last Great Gold Rush, 1896-1899 (40 page)

At its peak Athabasca Landing boasted two hotels, a restaurant, four general stores, a butcher shop (which did duty as a concert and dance hall), a barber shop, two bakeries, and half a dozen thriving boat yards where every type of craft was under construction, from ungainly scows to sixty-foot steamboats capable of carrying fifty passengers. “I confess I think no part of the world, Liverpool included, can boast so many different models,” one correspondent reported to Edmonton. “It looks as though every man who ever had an idea that he was a boat engineer was here and had tried his hand and the result is boats – beautiful, practical, pathetic, ludicrous.…” There were more than one hundred craft, and by late May, the entire flotilla was drifting down north. Within two months it had lost its bunched-up character and was scattered for thirteen hundred miles along the Mackenzie River system.

One hundred and ten miles of rapids faced the boatmen on the Athabasca River before Lake Athabasca was reached. The boats churned around the great boulders of Pelican Rapids, where the spray was flung twenty feet into the air, and then forced their way through Boiler Rapids, Strong Rapids, Crooked Rapids, and Grand Rapids until they reached the Big Cascade, where the current raced over a ledge of rock at twenty-five miles an hour. Boats were mired, crushed, abandoned on sand-bars, and wrecked on rocks. One man was drowned; many turned back. The rest surged on down the broadening river, past the oozing and mysterious tar sands that hung from the banks like treacle, then over the hard portages of the Slave River, whose rapids were so fierce that white pelicans bred in masses on an island in the centre where neither man nor beast could reach them, and finally out onto the leaden expanse of Great Slave Lake, where the storms were as fierce as those on the ocean and the tossing waters vanished over the rim of the horizon.

Once they had crossed this dismaying inland sea, the stampeders found themselves swept into the Mackenzie proper, the great waterway that would lead them to the Arctic. Out of the mountains, from the west, into the mile-wide river poured the turbulent Liard. About eighty men turned up this stream, to fight their way through canyon and rapids in the hope of joining those who had come overland from the Peace (and who were in many cases fleeing the Liard country in favour of the Mackenzie). The remainder continued on down the main river, where hidden seams of coal smoked and smouldered perpetually, where great blue ice-lenses lay exposed on the tottering clay banks, where ghost-like thickets of scorched aspens and “drunken” forests of spindly spruce reeled at awkward angles in the permanently frozen soil, where Indian children ran naked and babbling along the sandy shoreline, and squaws like Oriental idols squatted unsmiling on high green cliffs.

Halfway down the Mackenzie, not far from the site of Old Fort Norman, a second contingent peeled off the main body and turned west to assault the continental divide by way of the Gravel River (later renamed the Keele). Through this gaunt mountain country no white man had yet penetrated, but now a thin human seepage was trickling in. Some ninety-five men assaulted the divide and of these perhaps seventy or seventy-five eventually got through. But for many the Klondike was another year away.

The hardships, both psychological and physical, were so great that no man could say he remained unaffected. Since no one could haul more than a hundred and fifty pounds at a time over that seven-thousand-foot barrier, the trip had to be divided into ten-mile stages, each man doubling and re-doubling in his tracks between camps so that, in many cases, men trudged a total of twenty-seven hundred miles in order to move their outfits three hundred. It was bitterly cold in the mountains – so cold, indeed, that during one noon-hour break, Ernest Corp of Hamilton watched an inch-long icicle form on the spout of a coffee pot from which steam was also issuing. It is small wonder that almost every party that attempted to cross the divide by way of the Gravel River split up before the gold-fields were reached, and the divisions were often so bitter that equipment was sometimes chopped in half and boats sawn in two.

On the far side of the divide lay the rock-strewn Stewart, and when spring came, those who had managed to cross the mountains plunged down its unknown canyons and rapids aboard home-made scows caulked with spruce gum and winter underwear. They travelled blindly down the boiling stream, never knowing what the next bend would reveal, their numbers diminishing as they whirled on, until the remainder reached the Yukon River and thence, in August and September of 1899, managed to arrive in Dawson City.

This was an eddy in the main current of the stampede down the Mackenzie. The majority kept drifting deeper and deeper into the North, borne along without effort on the tawny breast of the mother stream. On they floated, into the land of the Dogrib Indians, who pitched their ragged tents on islands for fear of an invisible enemy stalking the forest glades; on past the yawning mouth of the Great Bear River, pouring its cobalt waters out of another fresh-water ocean athwart the Circle; on past blue-green forests and rust-red ponds, salt sinkholes, dried-up channels yellow with weeds, and ribbed cliffs jutting blackly a quarter mile above the water’s crest; on down the widening river with nothing to do but loll against the rudder bar until the silt-laden waters suddenly splayed out into the skein of the delta within hailing distance of the Arctic Ocean, and the long eleven-hundred-mile slide from Great Slave Lake was at an end.

The boats quit the Mackenzie here to turn up its two northernmost tributaries, the Arctic Red River and the Peel, whose headwaters stretched back like slender blood vessels into the labyrinth of the Mackenzie and Richardson mountains. This was sullen country: the bald, wind-swept land of the Crooked-Eye Indians, who lived in hide tepees and believed in a ghostly cannibal, black-faced and yellow-eyed, who gobbled women and children. Across this dun terrain, with its lifeless plains of muskeg broken only by the occasional stunted spruce and a few thin groves of skeletal willows, the winter snows shifted ceaselessly. Long before the main body of the stampeders reached the divide, the snow was upon them. Some turned off the Peel and headed west up its tributary, the Rat, hoping to cross the mountains and drift down the Bell and the Porcupine into Alaska to reach the Yukon River. Others pushed farther up the Peel, heading for other tributaries, the Wind or the Bonnet Plume, which led to passes in the mountains directly north and east of Dawson City.

Sooner or later the mountains had to be faced, and in the late fall of 1898, as the land congealed under the white hand of winter, the men from the cities and the farms and the offices and the factories began to attack the barrier, dragging scows and boats up and over the divides by the process called “tracking,” which is the crudest and most exhausting form of towing. Each man, with a canvas sling over his shoulder, helped haul the boat behind him, trudging thigh-deep through the freezing waters, leaping from rock to rock in the shallow, frothing streams, or struggling along the edges through tangled willows and over shale cliffs, or crawling on hands and knees along the slimy banks. As winter set in and the snow fell and the winds shrieked down the canyons that marked the entrances to the passes, the argonauts began to wheeze and cough with bronchitis. They were seldom dry. Their legs were masses of boils because of constant immersion in the cold water. Their flesh was rubbery from incipient scurvy, for it was six months since they had enjoyed a balanced diet. Beset by shoals and savage currents, by jagged rocks and ferocious boulders, by gloomy caverns and dizzy banks, they numbly forced their way on until the ice shackled the river and all movement ceased.

It was winter. All over the Canadian northwest, along the Edmonton trails, little settlements sprang up, from Great Slave Lake to the Arctic Circle, from the Peace River to the mountains above the Pelly. Some were mere huddles of shacks, like those that lay scattered along the approaches to the McDougall and Stony Creek passes. Some had names like Wind City, on the Wind River, a tributary of the Peel, or Shacktown and Destruction City, on the Rat. In addition there was the established trading post of Fort McPherson on the Peel, in whose vicinity scores of stampeders settled down for the long wait.

Some seventy men were camped at Wind City and many of these suffered horribly from scurvy. When gangrene set in, as it did in one or two cases, their toes were cut off with hacksaws; and when men died – as two or three did – their bodies were stuffed down empty mine shafts, which some of them had dug in the wistful hope that there might be gold here in the land of little sticks. The others whiled away the winter’s night with chess, checkers, and euchre, with dances and with lectures on scientific and literary subjects. Wind City’s residents even enacted a code of municipal laws so that the winter might pass “pleasantly and profitably away.”

Destruction City was situated at the start of a fierce series of rapids on the Rat which marked the ascent to McDougall Pass. Here the river bed rose so steeply – twelve hundred feet in thirty-five miles – that it was impossible to take large craft further. Men were forced to chop their boats down to manageable size and so the banks were marked by a confusion of wreckage that gave the settlement its name.

The only way to cross the pass that fall was to travel as lightly and as swiftly as possible. A French Canadian from Ottawa, J. E. des Lauriers, was one of those who threw away almost everything he owned in order to reach the Klondike. He left his entire outfit on the banks of the Rat at Destruction City, taking only a sack of flour, a side of bacon, a rifle, and a small boat. Thus unencumbered he attained his goal. Others found it impossible to get through. Between fifty and a hundred wintered in the immediate area of Destruction City, crouching in tents or cabins or huddled in caves scooped out of the banks, surrounded by piles of goods tossed aside by those who, like des Lauriers, had abandoned the bulk of their outfits in order to get across the divide. Here was everything a man needed, except for footwear – that had all been torn to shreds on the rocks of the river. And yet, in the midst of plenty, men sickened and sometimes died because they were unable to grasp the fundamentals of nutrition. Elsie Craig, who wintered at Destruction City, kept a death roll that reflected the international character of the camp: on November 20, a man from Chicago died of scurvy; on December 13, a Frenchman died of scurvy; in early January, two Dutchmen died of scurvy. And over this doomed camp there fluttered bravely several home-made Red Ensigns and a Stars and Stripes made of flour sacking and red calico.

Many of those who found themselves trapped in Destruction City had already spent one winter imprisoned in the North and were bitterly disillusioned. One party of thirteen people from Chicago were there because they had responded to a newspaper advertisement and paid five hundred dollars each to a charlatan with the curious name of Lambertus Warmolts, who masqueraded as a veteran of the Mackenzie country and guaranteed to deliver them to the Klondike in six weeks flat. He had decamped at Great Slave Lake with all the funds, leaving his charges stranded until spring. Rather than turn back they pushed on, so great was their desire to reach the gold-fields, and here they were rotting from scurvy on the banks of the Rat, with another winter facing them. A few of them did manage to reach Dawson in August of 1899.

Of all those who left Edmonton in 1897 and 1898 and pursued the various routes to the Klondike, only three, as far as can be determined, found any gold at all. Indeed, many of those who trickled into Dawson, ragged and destitute, did not even bother to go out to the gold-fields but headed back to civilization a few days after arriving. William Ford Langworthy, the Cambridge law graduate who celebrated New Year’s Eve, 1897, so nostalgically on the shores of Great Slave Lake, was one of these. His diary scarcely mentions Dawson, and its later entries never refer to gold but reflect the strange lassitude that fell over those who finally succeeded in reaching the end of the Edmonton trails. To these, gold no longer meant very much; survival had taken its place. Otto Sommer, who had turned his Klondike expedition into a honeymoon trip, got no farther than Grand Rapids on the Athabasca before turning back in despair. Frank Hoffman, the veteran of Sedan and Metz, was drowned in Great Slave Lake; his wife went on without him, lost her new-born baby somewhere en route, and wintered at Shacktown. A. D. Stewart, the former Hamilton mayor who had come down the river in the
Golden Hope
, died by inches on the Peel, “teeth all loose and gums very sore. In pitiable condition,” as his last diary entry reads.

Some beat the odds. Jim Wallwork, the cowboy, actually dragged his steamboat
Daisy Belle
over the summit from Shacktown to the Bell River, aided by thirty Indian sled dogs. The little craft finally reached the Yukon and there, unable to face the swift current, gave up the ghost. Wallwork transferred the eight-horsepower engine and the boiler to a York boat and continued upstream to Dawson. No doubt it was enough for him that he had made it, for those who set out from Edmonton to seek their fortunes counted themselves truly fortunate if they reached their goal. Others there were who never found what they were seeking – such as the two partners who were discovered in a cabin on the Porcupine River. They had come almost three thousand miles, buffeting the rapids and scaling the mountains and hacking their way through the forest; but when they were found, they were frozen rock-solid beside a stew kettle hanging over a long-dead fire. The pot contained a pair of partly cooked moccasins embedded in a cake of ice. The rest was ashes.